Page 75 of Spring's Arcana
“Sioux Falls,” Dmitri said finally, quietly. “If you want. We get snacks. This time you choose.”
“Can we just we drive straight through?” She shouldn’t push, Nat supposed. She should play nice, get along, keep her head down and her eyes open. “To Hardesty?”
“Da, zaika moya.” Dima nodded, and just like that, it was a done deal.
She couldn’t figure out just what she’d bought, but it was hers now. Both the knowledge, and the new, tentative silence in the car as it hummed over cold pavement, just short of flying.
DELAYED ENOUGH
Early on a strangely dark afternoon, while a black car roared relentlessly west seeking a small town, New York lay under a stiff iron blanket of cloud. More snow coming, the weather report said, and those whose lives depended on the water sought whatever port they could find because their bones warned of a real howler coming from the north. Pedestrians bundled into beetle-shapes hurried, the homeless sought shelters, warming stations, or the imperfect safety of the subway; every tow truck and plow in the city was pressed into service, working double shifts.
It was not a day for visiting, but the old man opened Laurelgrove Hospice’s front door. An ancient furry steppe hat was pulled down to his eyebrows, his hand-knit red muffler wrapped up to his nose, and normally he wore an old navy peacoat. Today, though, Leo Mishkin—no patronymic needed in America, left behind like so much baggage—wore a heavy striped cardigan over three threadbare flannel shirts, jeans almost wet to the knee with slush-splash, and heavy engineer boots a honey-haired girl used to shuffle across a yellow house’s back garden towards garbage cans chained to the fence.
He stamped his boots dry while eyeing the brightly lit Christmas tree in the foyer and unwound the muffler, changing from a masked intruder to an elderly fellow who might be a patient himself in the near future. He wasn’t recognized quite as readily as some of the younger visitors, but nobody seemed to notice as he set off with a determined shuffle.
After all, he knew the way. Signing in would waste time, and he suspected he had little enough of that.
The room he wanted was on the third floor and today the lift was working, albeit as slowly as he himself felt. Growing old was a man’s lot, all the books agreed.
Leo knew books lied. Wasn’t he living proof? Then again, they did it to show other truths, buried shapes and guessed-at contours, archaeology of the truly real. He was Russian, though he had come to the shining wasteland of America by choice; he could argue about literature all day.
He remembered teaching a little girl to read, holding her small hand around a chubby pencil, helping her trace a stark graceless alphabet entirely unlike the flowing script of his homeland. Holding the back of a bicycle seat as she wobbled, then the bright silver bell ringing as she shot away, pedaling furiously, her honey hair flying on a lucky breeze. A pale young woman in green and gold, so beautiful it could make a heart break or mend in a single instant, her hand palm-up on tacky plastic sheeting covering a table’s linens.
Mustn’t spoil the cloth, after all.
He stopped in the hallway once, resting next to a brightly crayoned sign bearing a useless mortal name. Coughs and murmurs of conversation throbbed through the entire building, its sad bones from another era peering through bright antiseptic modern use. Leo’s chin almost touched his sunken chest; he’d lost weight in the few days she’d been gone.
Why bother eating? Everything tasted of earth, even the ice cream he bought them both with couch-cushion change or small bits wrested from Maria when he behaved well.
When hepleasedher.
He set off again. Not so long now, a journey almost done.
The room was full of slumberous snowlight; Maria was propped up in the expensive bed. The oxygen machine gave a soft whoosh, and the tangle of tubes leading to her body might as well have been paste jewelry for all the good they’d do her. Leo’s sunken chest gave another deep twinge because the box of crackers, opened by Nat’scareful hands, stood sentinel on the adjustable bed table. It hadn’t been otherwise touched.
“Finally.” Maria’s large blue eyes were bloodshot, the whites yellowing. She was a straw-haired skeleton now, staring from under a black kerchief blotted with violently red flowers. Her bed jacket was awry—of course, her daughter hadn’t been in to button it properly, to comb her mother’s thinning mane, to stand patiently head-down while Maria lashed out. “I should have brought Raskolnikov instead.”
“Da,” Leo murmured. She probably should have. He looked around for a chair, found the one Nat perched in when her mother didn’t send her around the room on tiny errands—get me water, no with ice, fetch my bag from the closet, close the drapes, open them a little I can’t breathe, give me this, give me that.
And each time, her daughter did.
“You took your time,” Maria continued, the language of the old country rushing out of her thin mouth. No crimson upon plump pretty lips now, no soft pale cheek, no low laugh as she uncovered twin pale breasts, dusky-nippled, sweet as apples. “Is she gone? Did she take the car?”
Now she was a raddledbabain her own right, just the same as the old women she disdainfully sniffed at for so long, secure in her unassailable beauty. Leo, a fool like all men, had thought the loveliness meant a kind heart, or at least a willing one.
He finished unwrapping the muffler, took off his hat. His hair was gray as the oncoming storm, but still vigorous; he was rather vain about that, and combed it twice a day with a little oil. He set his hat on the swung-aside bed table, bumping the cracker box, and his old knob-knuckled hands—still strong enough, he hoped—occupied themselves with folding the scarf.
After all, Maria’s daughter had bought it for him.
“Leo,” Maria snapped. “Look at me.”
He didn’t want to, but he obeyed. A nurse in the hall might peek in and think them an ancient couple, perhaps still in love or the facsimile of it granted by time and mortal habit. He gazed uponthe woman he had adored enough to follow across a foaming sea-desert, enough to eat black bread with strange grit in its crumb, enough to push his body repeatedly into hers until a quickening kindled.
I know you love Mom,Maria’s daughter said, her arm outstretched and her dark eyes pleading.That’s a good thing.
“Nyet,” Leo mumbled, a cricket’s whisper. “It isn’t.”
“What? Speak up.” Maria made an irritable movement. She was furious, of course—the rage glittered in her blue eyes, wrinkled her nose, and made her thin bony hands clench against the tan hospital blanket. “Did she leave? She took the car?”
